Utility computing is viewed by many as the model of computing for the future, although the vision has been around for decades. The MULTICS project in the 1960s had the goal of developing “a new computer system specifically organized as a prototype of a computer utility,” with one of its requirements being “continuous operation analogous to that of the electric power and telephone companies.” In a computing utility, computing resources and capabilities are provided to people and businesses as a service.
One example of a computing utility that exists today is the Grid, which offers spare compute cycles to scientific and engineering applications. Another example is data center, where a large pool of IT resources are centrally managed to meet the needs of business critical enterprise applications such as enterprise resource planning applications, database applications, customer relationship management applications, and general e-commerce applications. There has been a wave of industrial initiatives to provide infrastructure and management support for such utilities.
A large utility computing environment can contain thousands of servers and storage devices connected through a shared high speed network fabric. The goal is to offer “infrastructure on demand,” which means compute, networking, and storage resources are provided to applications as they need them. Most of the resources will be virtualized and shared across multiple applications to achieve economies of scale and increase return on investment. The complexity of managing such an infrastructure and applications simultaneously is enormous. Automation is needed to lower operation cost and reduce human error. Well-informed capacity planning and resource provisioning are required to increase asset utilization and meet service level objectives.